The present invention relates generally to the field of communications, and more particularly to processing certain communications as a set of tasks.
Electronic messaging via mobile devices and personal computers has rapidly become a primary communications tool. Many web applications, whether social media or e-mail services, provide for electronic communications in the form of instant messaging (IM), electronic mail (e-mail), and other messaging platforms supported by the various applications. While some proprietary email systems and webmail systems are in use, many use simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), an Internet standard for email. Further, instant messaging generally uses proprietary protocols over technical architectures such as peer-to-peer and client-server configurations. Accessing electronic messaging applications for a given user generally requires entering user login credentials for security reasons.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Generally speaking, NLP systems use machine learning to analyze and derive meaning from textual corpora (that is, sets of textual content), as used herein electronic messages are the textual corpora. Natural language dialog systems create natural interaction mechanisms for human-computer interactions. State of the art rule-based dialog systems rely on manually-developed rules.
Advances in communication technology include identifying an originator of an outgoing message and making assignments and/or tracking ownership of marked questions within the outgoing message and parsing text of an electronic communication to determine questions presented within the text or to identify question-answer pairs within electronic communication chains, or related communications. It is also known to generate an answer-required field in an e-mail message and determining whether an answer to the answer-required field is included in a response.